Image viewer dialog window

Today’s Opera developer update contains two main functionality changes. One of these is already known but significantly changed while the other is quite new. Here they are:

New battery saver UI

We attempted to redesign the battery saver UI so that it can suit needs of both regular and experienced users. Experienced users will find additional power saving settings to tinker with in feature builds (behind a flag at the moment), while regular users will have immediate access to the power saving mode, with default settings, through visual hints. The hints show more info regarding the function, for instance we have added a counter which estimates how much battery time is left for the user:

Speed Dial suggestions

We are also releasing the very early preview of an easier way to add your most popular websites to your speed dials. At the moment, we experiment with the most popular websites and also investigate possibility how to make those suggestions more relevant. This feature will be developed for the next weeks, so your feedback is highly welcome.

Known issues

I must admit I feel really embarrassed to have to announce that the x64 Windows builds are still not available. We are hoping for the best but myself, I cannot really do anything.
Also, OS X users won’t be able to use the Netflix service because of a problem with the Widevine plugin.

Related articles

Aaaand, congratulations on being the first commenter. 😉 It’s not an easy feat to do this before @nanana1 does. 🙂

Ralf Brinkmann

Indeed. Maybe he is on holiday. 🙂
So this was a good omen for the day and I hope soon to find the trick for a better TAB-handling of the download page. Then the day would be perfect.

SoniC

Hi Aneta, VPN is still in a infinite “Connecting” loop, without a selection of locations. Maybe _if you have time and energy_ we can continue it here 😉
I wanted now to test the scenario 1 (“fresh install”) however my main prob is — I have Opera Dev installed everywhere… so I would need to simulate the clean install…. Is it enuff to just rename the appdata/roaming/opera/opera dev ? Or should I also rename some other folders ?

BTW – I like your Disqus profile photo even more than the pillow 😉

Aneta Reluga

Thanks for your nice words 😉

As for the fresh installation simulation – yes, it should be enough to close Opera and temporarily rename the Opera Developer profile folder. I’m often doing it myself for testing purposes (usually renaming to something like: “Opera Developer 20160713” to indicate the date)
Also, USB standalone installation would work, if you really want to have everything completely clean; in addition, you can delete the whole USB folder afterwards without any repercussions on your main dev.

L33t4opera

Hi Kornelia, thanks for the update, and fixes 😉

New shortcut - "Shift+Esc" to open the Task Manager (it seems to be not assigned on Mac, but you can add it yourself).

New option - Customise start page > Speed Dial > Hide suggestions (the feature was behind the flag only in the previous build).

I’m too!!! At least in Windows!!! I have all of them in 64bits on Linux…..

Angry Penguin

Quick info:
Linux Ubuntu 16.04 x64.

h264 not working, even if I launch it with this command line: opera-developer –ffmpeg-preload-mode=permissive

I have installed chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-53.0.2785.8-0ubuntu1~ppa1~16.04.1
so h264 should work. In Chrome stable h264 working fine, in Chromium 53 dev ppa for Ubuntu also working fine.

Any solution?

L33t4opera

Hi, just follow the below steps:
1. Navigate to the installation folder (find the path in Opera’s menu > About Opera), and create a new folder “lib_extra”,
2. Download one of the following packages (the first is the best choice, but the second also works): opera-developer-ffmpeg-codecs-53.0.2767.4, or opera-beta-ffmpeg-codecs-52.0.2743.49, and extract the “libffmpeg.so” file to the “lib_extra” folder.

Alternatively, the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra_51.0.2704.79 from the Ubuntu repositories (deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security main universe), works also with this OPD40 version.
In case, that for some reasons you have to keep the version, which you mentioned above, you can extract the “libffmpeg.so” file to the “lib_extra” from this package, and if not, then you can uninstall it, and install this one.

Angry Penguin

Your solution working for me. Thanks. But why we would do this? Not better get this as default without any user integration?

L33t4opera

You’re welcome 😉
“Opera can’t do this, because we don’t have the (expensive) license to redistribute binaries that can decode H264 from MPEG LA” – the source link.

Angry Penguin

Ok, Opera not have license but can use ffmpeg plugin if it installed.
So, Opera can use few path to custom dir for PAPPI Flash, so why not making the same with libffmpeg.so?

Add to opera path with finding few dir like /usr/lib/chromium-browser/ and /usr/lib/chromium-browser/libs and /usr/share/chromium-browser and maybe few more like in Flash.
Why not?

L33t4opera

It is already implemented, you can add your own path to the library in the “ffmpeg_preload_config.json” file, which you can find in the “/installation-root/resources” subdirectory, though in this case, the changes will be overwritten by the next update. If you want it to be present in the file by default, you can request it here on the blog, or add a new post on the forums under the “Suggestion Box“.

Alexander

Maybe rename “you would like to add” to “Frequent sites” and add pin button to frequent sites?

iYuzver

Not enough opportunity to disable the folder icons on the Favorites bar.

Druszlak

Um, finally W10 as a preview platform instead of Mac OS.

Still Opera’s W10 theme is ugly. ^^

Leonardo Gomes

Why do you think it’s ugly?

SoniC

Maybe cause they customized it to look like W10 ;-)) ///sarcasm off —-> still find W10 ugly 🙁

Druszlak

Looks so… Basic? I know it’s in line with W10 design language, but this is not my kind of aesthetic.

bwat47

> Still Opera’s W10 theme is ugly

Disagree, best looking browser on windows 10 by far imo

Trevor Gough

What does “NaNm to read” mean in Personal News tiles? It shows up quite frequently instead of a number of minutes.

x a

NaN means ”not a number“. So it’s a bug when a user gets to see this.

Trevor Gough

Thank you, x a!

reiner1302

task manager: the cpu usage is always 0 for all processes. thx for the short cut

It’s a bit weird adding an option for that. Can you think of other ways that would also work? Maybe remembering what a user selected last time, and use that as the default image when clicking new heart?

Michal

I myself like the logo best 😉 But, yes, if the browser remembered what I chose last time (or what I usually choose) is a good idea.

Pau B

On the old Opera 30 there was the option “Experimental start page” in opera://flags to choose a Speed Dial with thumbnails or just plain text. Then you removed that option. 🙁 Many of us just want the option that when adding a NEW website to the Speed Dial it shows as a thumbnail of that website by default and not just plain text. The option existed before. Why don’t you, Opera developers, allow us that level or personalization of the Speed Dial. You could add that option to the Speed Dial top right wrench icon. Thank you. 🙂

Leonardo Gomes

opera://flags is for enabling/disabling experiments. When a experiment ends, the related flag(s) is (are) removed.

opera://flags is snot a settings’page.

Pau B

Leonardo, we all already know that.

What I’m talking to Odin is about the Speed Dial thumbnail flag being removed and not becoming a permanent Speed Dial setting because Opera developers did not think it was useful enough.

Thanks. 🙂

Leonardo Gomes

And what I’m saying is that not all experiments will not be converted in a setting /option.
Many of them will just be implemented or not.

Your opinion is not interesting to me!
Already tired of your endless excuses of everything that concerns Opera.

Leonardo Gomes

So just ignore it. Or, if you want, block me.

Marko Koivuniemi

I reply to Leonardo because Cobalt is not interested hearing anything. You’re right. Start Page contains Speed Dial, suggestions and search field. You can choose what you would like to see in start page – speed dial is one part of it.

Yeah, it’s as the others say. Start Page contains the Speed Dial. However, there are some irregularities there, because we changed this some versions ago with the start page customization panel. Before that the web search box etc *was* part of the speed dial, and that entire page was named Speed Dial. That’s no longer the case.

Since you can disable the speed dial now, it doesn’t make sense to call the start page the speed dial. You can only have the search box there if you like, or maybe just nothing 😛

But yeah, we should probably think about that and get it cleaned up. It’s just, Speed Dial is quite important name, startpage is just a startpage. The most prominent and important feature of the startpage is the Speed Dial as well.

Marc

I have set a shortcut to go back a page using backspace. Now when I want to edit the url in the addressbar and try to delete part of the url using backspace it triggers the shortcut instead of deleting the text.
Shouldn’t editing something in a textfield (addressbar) prevent it from going back a page?
Edit: This only happened since this update.

Roby

Do you plan on syncing custom search engines?
It’s a pain to set them all up again on a new computer or OS each time.
And I have quite a few since they speed up browsing quite a bit. There’s no need to visit and load the entire site each time just to use their search after all.

L33t4opera

Hi Roby, there’s no need to add them all again one by one on the other PC/OS: navigate to the Opera’s profile folder (find the path in Opera's menu > About Opera), make a copy of the “Web Data” file, and copy it to a USB stick (or send it by e-mail), and on another PC: make sure, that the Opera is closed, and overwrite the current “Web Data” with the copy 😉

What extension pages? If you use some page a lot, it might make sense to have a quick access to it. Though indeed with extensions it probably has a button on the browser chrome.

But would it make sense to just blacklist all extension pages from SD suggestions? I’m not sure whether it is without drawbacks.

What do you (and others) think?

_artem_

lastpass… 2 factor… i don’t trust my work pc 😀
so that page popups every time i open browser to enter 2 factor code. i don’t need to go to that page it’s opened automaticaly on new browser session. and exactly that page is now in suggestions

Okay. It would be hard to know these things though. You can remove it from suggestions by right clicking => “remove suggestion”.

You make a good point, but if there was another extension page I normally visited quite regularly myself, I might like that it turns up as a suggestion.

Do note that the suggestions are also meant to help people understand they can add their own sites there. And also to help us who know that about which pages we probably should add. I found a few myself. 🙂

x a

Extensions using chrome.omnibar API don’t work reliably in that respect (keyword does not send them their events) for a few builds now…
___
(I use these two of mine extensions, should someone need a test case: [1][2])

Would be very happy about taking feedback on the suggestions btw. The content, how it works, etc etc etc. There are quite a lot of bugs, you might mention them though we probably know already – mostly interested in what you think of it and how it works on your machines 😉

Leonardo Gomes

– When you drag a suggested entry, you can’t drop it on the right of the last Speed Dial.

– At least for more popular sites (Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, etc), it could show the page logo instead of the address.

– If you remove a suggestion and just after that open a new Start Page then you will see the ‘removed’ suggestion.

Nekomajin43

I would be glad to test it, but I can’t make it work. The flag is enabled, the checkbox in the start page settings is checked. I don’t use the dev builds very often, but I have a decent history, and still, nothing shows up as a suggestion. After how many page views will it start to work?

An idea though, you should empty the speed dial in fresh installs and preset a few sites as suggestions. It would reach the same goal, but it would be easier to clean the “mess” as an advanced user.

Another thing. In O12, there was an algorithm to find the main logo of the site and use it in the speed dial. It seems that not it only searches in the metadata (link rel=”icon”). Am I right? It would be a lot of work to implement a solution from O12, but instead you could add a feature to the screenshot stuff to manually select an image. For example, I open a page, which has a nice big logo, but it is not defined in the head section of the HTML, so I can’t use it in the speed dial. If I select the screenshot option, I might be able to zoom to the logo, but it could be noisy/blured, or other part of the page could show up in the screenshot too. But if I was able to select an element manually (like in the web inspector), I could find the img element, or any other element with a background-image property. How about this?

Leonardo Gomes

For me it took a couple of days at least to start showing suggestions.

Any plans to make the browser more compact on Windows (like it is on macOS)? The title bar is a waste of space, in my opinion. It would look better if it were like Vivaldi or Chrome which have a smaller title bar and more compact look when used in windowed mode.

Cobalt

Totally agree!

Zin

Still waiting/hopeful for the features of old to come back, i hope the chinese pay attention to this.

Unknown Person

(Windows 10) Trying to open a new instance of Opera (by right clicking on taskbar icon and selecting ‘New Window’) on a different virtual desktop does nothing if there is another Opera window on a different desktop. But if you click the right click and select Opera, a new window opens (like how most other programs work) Could I adjust the ‘New Window’ option to have the same functionality? I always click the ‘New Window’ by mistake. Thanks

hylik

Hi I noticed that Opera no longer focus address bar after opening a new private tab (no blinking cursor) so i can’t immediately start typing (works fine on opening a new regular tab)

Kornelia

Thanks for that, I’ve reported this issue in our database as DNA-55918.

Mike

Address bar seems a tad broke? Clicking to give focus to the address bar then pressing backspace will go back a page rather than delete the text in the address bar. Seems to affect ctrl+L to select all the text as well when the address bar has focus – nothing happens.

Kornelia

Thanks for that, reported in our database as DNA-55918.

L33t4opera

Hi Mike, go to opera:settings/configureCommands, and see, if the Backspace is assigned to the “Back” function, and if so, then remove it, press “OK”, and check if this helps.

The new contextual menu breaks the reply feature on reddit. Reported as bug.

Angry Penguin

Netflix still not working on Opera developer for Linux Ubuntu. I trying also with plugin widevine from Chrome, and drm html5 video not want load.

Can you fix this and make Netflix working like in Opera on Windows and Mac? We on Linux need this.

EDIT: Nevermind, when I create symlink to libffmpeg in /opera_developer/lib_extra/ I get finally working h264, and now also widevine plugings from chrome start working.

So maybe any hope to get widevine plugin in opera without installation chrome on Linux?

Angry Penguin

Also on Ubuntu 16.04 in new Opera developer 40 every run I get message with “Enter the password to unlock the account password”, or something like that (I don’t remember in 100%). I can easy ignore it by click on cancel but this is annoying.
I think this is related to new Chromium 53 code.
Can you trying fix it?

Nekomajin43

Two remarks on the video pop-out.

It would be good to have a window frame around the pop-out. I know it’s more futuristic this way, but on certain background, it’s hard to find the edges to resize. So please implement some kind of (native-like) frame, which is visible, at least on hover.

The other thing is the pop-out icon. It is really annoying when it stays on after mouse leave. It should be visible only on hover, and should disappear right after the mouse leaves the video area.

Aneta Reluga

Thanks – I forwarded the feedback. As for the frame, it is being considered AFAIK; no idea about your second remark regarding the icon.